"Datura" by Tori Amos

I had a group interview with two Koreans last week. One of them said I was "dishonest." This almost lost me the job. I was not dishonest. Last night I had this dream:

I am part of the End-of-the-World-Great-Flood-Emergency-Medical-Save-the-World-Team. We are rehearsing through evacuation procedures, which involves battening down hatches, tying some eight-figure knots, running through an obstacle course. I do not have medical expertise, but I have a gun. The rest of the team has gone through the course. The only ones left were me, and two Korean guys. The last part is sliding down this rubber-mesh chute, a tunnel of interwoven rubber bands. I manage to go through, but the two Korean guys got entangled and were held up.

I looked at my gun, but decided to put it back in my pocket. I waited for them.

The two men finally extricated themselves and we returned to the headquarters inside the ship, where the rest of the team was already waiting.

"Bad news," said the captain, "the British team beat us. They did this course in 6 minutes. We were almost two minutes slower."

The two Korean guys panicked, fumbled for words, could not explain themselves. But I spoke up.

"I think there's a problem with the chute. I think we should consider replacing the rubber with a kevlar material. It would be just as flexible, light and durable. And it would have less friction -- we wouldn't get stuck."

The Korean guys looked at me. They didn't care that I had helped them. But the captain and the rest of the team nodded at me.

The end.

I believe this dream is about forgiveness and about perspective.

A few hours later the HR lady at CG called me and said they'd allowed me to proceed to the next step of the hiring process. She talked about what those two guys said about me.

"One hour [of interviewing] probably isn't enough time to get to know somebody," she said. This is as close as I'm going to get to an apology in a corporate environment.

"I'm fine with it," I said. "I'll trust your judgement on this. If you say it's nothing to be concerned about, I'll just drop it. I don't want to make a big deal about it."

"I wouldn' t be concerned," she said. "We feel you won't have problems fitting in with the team."

And then we started talking about compensation and I gave her my desired salary, which is probably not a lot of money to a lot of people but is plenty for me. When I was a kid my standard for being wealthy was having the ability to buy any CD and two pizzas on a whim. I reached that point a couple years ago so everything since is icing on the cake. My idea of luxury is sweating a lot and being able to take a good-scrub hot shower and having a glass of orange juice right after. And of course my ideal vacation is being stranded in a third world country and coming across a cafe where I can have me a nice cigarette and a little bit of something to eat and drink.